The original Academy of Ancient Music

by William Weber

As for that indefatigable Society, the Gropers into Antique Musick, and Hummers of Madrigals, they swoon at the Sight of any Piece modern, particularly your [Handel’s] Composition, excepting the Performances of their venerable President [Pepusch], whose Works bear such vast Resemblance to the regular Gravity of the Antients, that when dress’d up in Cobwebs, and powdered with Dust, the Philharmonick Spiders could dwell on them, and in them, to Eternity. From Harmony in an Uproar.

The founding of the Academy of Ancient Music in 1726 was a landmark in the tradition of Western classical music. The Academy was unique in its time for performance of works one hundred and fifty or more years old, music that in some cases — madrigals and motets of Luca di Marenzio, for example — had not been performed since their time. Nowhere else in Europe did anything comparable to such performances develop until the mid-nineteenth century.

Let us remember that prior to the eighteenth century it was unusual, though not entirely unknown, for works to remain in performance more than a generation. For one thing, music did not possess a corpus of works from antiquity upon which a classical tradition could be mounted. For another, celebrations in courts or cities demanded new works entirely. Indeed, the whole idea of performing old music was foreign to musical culture of this time; it was presumed that works would always pass out of use as taste changed. There were a few exceptions, such as the performance of Palestrina’s music in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, but contemporaries did not perceive such practices together as a classical — music tradition such as we participate in today.

The Academy was originally founded in 1726 as the Academy of Vocal Music. Its inspiration came from the general idea of an ‘academy’, as the gathering of those learned in an area of the arts and letters such as was found both in Italian cities and in the Royal Society of London. In some cases, however, the term was used for a performing company (the Royal Academy of Music, 1720–28, for example, London’s opera). The Academy of Ancient Music was a private club to which members were elected, but one can presume that any person interested in so unusual a repertory was admitted. As all such associations of the time, it met in a public house, with drinks, a meal and smoking normally involved with the gathering. A record of the program of the first meeting described it as ‘A Musick Meeting being held at ye Crown Tavern near St. Clement’s, Mr Galliard at ye head of it, & chiefly for Grave ancient Vocall Musick. Wee begann it with ye following Song [motet] of Lucas De Marenzio.’

The use of the word ‘ancient’ itself was significant. Up to that time one spoke of something ‘ancient’ only when it was a product of antiquity; any other use made no sense. But beginning in the last decades of the seventeenth century the more learned musicians and amateurs began applying the word to music composed prior to around 1625. By the 1720s it became a common musical term, and in 1731 the Academy changed its name to the Academy of Ancient Music, though its repertory does not seem to have changed significantly.

At the Academy’s inception its membership included some of the most prominent foreign musicians resident in London: Handel’s rival Giovanni Bononcini and the aging castrato Pier Francesco Tosi, for example. The honorary president, ‘in absentia’, was Agostino Steffani, the distinguished Italian musician who had received appointments as bishop in northern Germany and Asia Minor. But most of the members were from the choirs of the Chapel Royal, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey — the leading English male vocalists of the time, most prominently Maurice Greene, the Organist at St Paul’s. The Academy served as a kind of professional association for them, giving them the opportunity to meet and to perform a choice and highly unusual repertory.

There were also a small but significant number of amateurs among the members as well. Most had strong musical interests. Sir John Dolben, for example, born of an old Northamptonshire family, studied at Christ Church, Oxford, whose Rector Henry Aldrich was the leading proponent of ancient music. Humphrey Wyrley Birch, a lawyer from Warwickshire, was known to travel anywhere to hear the funeral services of Henry Purcell or William Croft; he managed to walk with the choir, but not sing, in the funeral of Queen Caroline in 1737. One nobleman was an active member. John Perceval (after 1733 the Earl of Egmont) had an active musical life; in 1714, for example, he wrote in his diary that he helped the Archbishop of Armagh find good countertenors for Christ Church, Dublin. And, interestingly enough, William Hogarth — a vigorous opponent of canonic thinking in art — was registered as a member in the records of 1731.

During its first ten years, the Academy underwent serious internal disputes that ended up making it smaller and more specialized than had been intended. First Greene entered into conflict over leadership of the Academy with Bernard Gates, Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey; then Bononcini claimed that a madrigal attributed to the Venetian Antonio Lotti was his own. By 1735 the foreign musicians were no longer active members, and the leadership passed to Johann Christoph Pepusch, the Berlin musician who had come to London around 1704. Though he composed for the theatre until the end of the 1720s (most prominently the overture and possibly some songs of The Beggar’s Opera), he shifted increasingly into an academic vein, becoming the leading teacher of the more learned sort in London. From the 1740s to the early 1780s the Academy had a low profile in London musical life, the gathering of a small but forward-looking group of musicians and amateurs.

Dr John Pepusch

The repertory of the Academy in its first five decades was quite different from what its successor performs today. While only two dozen programs are extant from before the 1770s, they do give us a fairly clear picture of what was performed. One component never missing from the programmes was sacred music of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century — motets, psalm settings, services or anthems, by Giovanni Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Gregorio Allegri, Giovanni Colonna, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. A second component was madrigals of that same epoch, by such composers as Marenzio, Thomas Morley, John Wilbye, John Bennet and John Farmer. The performances always ended with the canon ‘Non nobis domine’, attributed (we now know incorrectly) to Byrd.

It is important to note that Italian music was central to the Academy’s repertory. The institution in part served to honor the master composers of the English tradition; there is evidence that works by Elizabethan composers had been sung on a continuing basis in a few cathedrals or college chapels since the sixteenth century. Yet one cannot call the Academy nationalistic, since any serious musician had to be schooled in recent Italian styles. If any two ‘ancient’ composers were represented regularly on the programs, they were Palestrina and Byrd.

Music of the seventeenth century was even more commonly Italian than that of the previous century, even though there was not a great amount of it in the repertory. The composers most often represented were Alessandro Stradella, Giacomo Carissimi, and Giovanni Bassani. Among British musicians, Purcell loomed the largest, chiefly his anthems, four-part psalms, and theatre music.

The society was not strictly antiquarian, since the number of pieces of that time equalled those from the musical past. Yet contemporary works were chosen from a limited number of genres and generally were fairly conservative in style; one did not go to the Academy to hear fashionable new opera arias. Some works were from learned idioms — madrigals, for example, by Steffani and Lotti and canzonets of Benjamin Cooke and John Travers. The programs often included a Stabat Mater written by the baron Emanuele D’Astorga in a conservative polyphonic style. George Frideric Handel’s music, which occurred often in the programs, had become old fashioned by the 1730s. Several of his oratorios were done, most prominently Esther, Israel in Egypt, and Messiah, as were his Chandos Anthems and settings of the Te Deum. The most up-to-date component of the Academy’s repertory was the music of Giovanni Pergolesi, the best-known figure in the new style that emerged in the 1720s. While his works of ‘opera buffa’ were not done there, his sacred works appeared often, chiefly his masses and his motets on psalm texts.

A program given on April 24, 1746 included the following:

Handel: drawing taken from a programme booklet for The Concert of Antient Music

The Academy likewise underwent a fundamental reshaping between the 1760s and early 1780s. By 1790 the programs offered only a limited repertory from the sixteenth century, usually madrigals, and focused each of Handel’s music and upon quite recent works, particularly glees, concertos and symphonies. While prior to 1759 no strictly instrumental works seem to have been done, by the late 1760s the concertos of Corelli, Handel, Geminiani and Avison become prominent, providing the first major continuity in repertory with that practiced by the Academy today.

The stunning success of the Concert of Antient Music led its music director Benjamin Cooke to change the club into a public concert series. In 1784 he began performances at the Freemasons’ Hall in Lincoln’s Inn, which held around 900 people. In 1789 the series came under the direction of Samuel Arnold, who edited Handel’s oratorios, odes and masques and conducted oratorio medleys in the theatres. Choral-orchestral works became central to the series; the programs came to resemble those of the Antient Concerts in focusing upon music by Handel, Corelli, and Purcell.

Still, the Academy pointed ahead to the future of concert programming, since unlike the newer series it offered a mix of Ancients and Moderns, most important of all overtures, symphonies and opera arias by Haydn, Nicola Piccinni, Domenico Cimarosa, and Giuseppe Sarti, and glees by Cooke, R. J. S. Stevens, and John Callcott. In this respect the Academy developed the closest prototype of what classical-music concerts, the Philharmonic Society particularly, would look like during the nineteenth century.

Thus a program given on March 13, 1794:

If you are interested in reading more, see Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (1993) and William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992).

William Weber